Asylum--Chapter Three The Whistle Stop

Chapter Three
The Whistle Stop

Three days after breakup, the main parade on the river had ended but stragglers of ice slid by, the now-quiet water making the individual mutterings of each piece audible. One grunted as its underbelly struck the gravel bar near the river’s edge; another hissed with displeasure as a smaller piece sideswiped it, sheering off a piece of its brown scabby flank. I climbed down the bank and walked amongst the small icebergs stranded in the mud. The last sun, slanting at a low angle, lit their translucent undersides, glowing blue. I ran my fingernail along the edge of a columnar chunk, sending a cascade of pipettes of ice tinkling to the rocks below. There were freeform, transparent globs on the sand, jellyfish of ice. I held a chunk in my hand and examined my fingers plainly visible through the clear ice. A tall iceberg passed in the water, leaning precariously. Fifty yards downriver it turned turtle and exploded, sending chunks splashing into the water and onto the bank, making a sharp report like gunfire that echoed against the bluff. An imposing figure sailed parallel to shore, a lone dowager with a sagging gray bosom. As it passed, I could hear it crunching softly, a delicate, watercress-sandwich kind of sound. Before I turned to go, I watched one last piece of ice pass by, making a swishing, sweeping sound like the man with the push broom who follows the parade.

The next day, I decided to walk from one end of the town to the other along the river, next to the ice piled on shore. Halfway to my destination at Mission Creek, the strip of shore suddenly narrowed. The rocks shifted beneath my feet. I slipped and almost fell into the water, which was cold enough to paralyze your muscles within minutes. I scrambled onto the ice and stepped carefully from one chunk to the other, but it was slow going. The graceful ice shapes that I’d seen, just a few days before, floating peacefully past, were now frozen into a wicked jumble with hidden crevasses, and I repeatedly plunged in up to my thigh.  As I pulled and twisted to get my ankle free, it occurred to me I could break a leg and no one would know. It was after five and the store on Front Street just above me had closed. The sound of cars coming and going had stopped. 

My only choice was to somehow scramble up the riverbank. Thick roots protruded from the dirt far above my head. Teetering along a tree trunk that had come to rest at an upward angle, I was able to grab one of the roots. With a strength I didn’t know I had, I pulled myself up, hand over hand, until I reached the top. I stood there, feeling foolish for thinking I could take a stroll along the river at this time of year. I reminded myself that this was not the tame landscape of the Palouse, where shallow streams meandered between the hills. It was more like my friend Liz’s ranch in Idaho, where I’d had to be very aware of my surroundings and alert to possible danger. There it might be a well-camouflaged rattlesnake, here a hidden crevasse.

My parents were already dead by the time I started going to the ranch. I had sometimes wondered what they would have thought of me—their shy, weak daughter—rowing across the broad Snake River or chasing after half-wild cattle, my chaps flapping. As a teen, when I had wanted to go backpacking in the Rockies or take an Outward Bound course, my mother would say, “You’re a city girl. What makes you think you can do things like that?” Her words echoed what Smokey was told when she married for the fourth time and moved to Alaska with Scotty. Her elderly father was dismayed at the news they were heading north. “You’re a city girl,” he wrote to her. “You have no business in Alaska.” As I trudged back to my cabin, shivering and with my pants stiff with half-frozen mud, I doubted myself, too, asking “Do I have any business in Alaska when I’m not, and may never be, as competent and self-reliant as Liz or the women here in Eagle? Do I have any business being here when my home is so far away?”

After I cleaned myself up, I climbed the ladder to the loft and huddled under the blankets, trying to warm up. Sleeping in a loft was a novel experience for me, and the low ceiling made it feel cozy. I’d dragged the bed close to the railing so I could look down at the simple scene below—the rustic furniture, the pegs on the wall holding my rain coat and hat, and the window sill where I put treasures I’d found— smooth river rocks, pieces of driftwood, and scrolls of birch bark. The only thing I didn’t like was the oil drip stove, which I’d never quite gotten the hang of lighting. When I mistimed it, the vapors erupted into flames with a terrifying “whoosh.”

I enjoyed having my own private outhouse, where I would sit contentedly with the door propped open a crack, reading old magazines about bush flying and muzzle loading. I wasn’t even bothered by the barking of my neighbor’s three-legged hound dog, chained just a few yards away. The dog had run off and gotten its leg caught in a lynx snare, and by the time it had limped home, the leg was full of gangrene and had to be amputated. Sometimes the daughter visited and the dog hopped over to her, baying ecstatically. She rubbed his ears, cooing “Oh, Blacky boy, you don’t have a leg.”

I met another one of my neighbors when I passed by her cabin and the stout dog on the porch barked at me. I recognized him as the one I often saw hauling his owner around town. A thin old woman, listing slightly to one side, came to the door. She had a sharp, intelligent face and a thick mane of hair dyed a flattering shade of red. Hushing her dog, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” as if she’d been waiting for me for a long time. She held out her hand, and I was surprised to find that she had the strongest handshake of any woman I’d ever met. Ushering me into the one-room cabin, she asked with a roguish grin, “How would you like a little Bailey’s Irish Cream?” 

She talked on as if we’d just left off in mid-conversation. “I’m so bored, I can’t wait til the road opens and I can drive to Tok. I always get a hamburger, do a little grocery shopping, and then come home.”

I marveled at an elderly woman—eighty-five years old if she was a day—driving one hundred and seventy miles on a bad road just for something to do. I took the cup offered to me and sat on the couch, pushing aside a pile of wildlife calendars. Assessing me with a keen eye, she said, “You’re that writer I’ve been hearing about!”

“Yes,” I said, relieved she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. “And you’re Esther. I see you sometimes walking your dog.”

 “Well, I can’t get around like I used to but Flash needs his exercise. This darned arthritis. Oh heck, that’s the way it goes. But you have to keep moving.”

There was a bark or two outside, and Esther immediately got a bowl of dry kibble, on top of which she put a dollop of canned dog food. Her dog heaved himself up the stairs and came inside.

“I just can’t seem to get poor Flash to eat,” she worried, setting down the bowl and patting his well-padded back. “There you go. Now eat up, that’s a good boy.”

I looked around at the walls covered with pictures of otters, tigers, seals, and other appealing-eyed creatures and said, “You must love animals.”

“Yes, I can’t stand to see an animal suffer. You wouldn’t believe the way some people around here treat their dogs. They keep them chained up, half-starved. If I see a dog like that, I’ll sneak into the yard and give the poor thing some food. And the owners yell at me, like I’m the one doing something wrong! Once I even got in trouble for trespassing. I don’t let that stop me. But that’s enough about me. So,” she said, leaning forward eagerly, “what are you writing?”

I told her about my book and how my grandparents had moved to the bush when they were in their sixties. Esther listened intently and when I was finished, she said,

 “I always wanted a cabin in the woods, too. Just as soon as I retired from teaching, I came out here from Michigan. People couldn’t imagine what I was doing, a single woman moving to Eagle at my age. I had such a wonderful time back then! I had my own boat and a four-wheeler. I learned how to use a chainsaw and cut my own firewood. Hiked all over. I’d take my snowmachine downriver and visit people.”

I supposed that by “snowmachine,” she meant “snowmobile.” Another unique word that wasn’t used Outside. I still had a lot to learn about Alaska.

“Oh,” Esther exclaimed, “the best trip I ever went on was with Jack Gibson as my guide. We took a boat down the Porcupine River. It’s way up north somewhere. A black bear came up really close, and dummy me, I hollered for Jack instead of just standing there watching it.” She was silent for a minute, remembering those days with a smile. “When I die, I want my gravestone to read: Here lies Esther. She finally found her wilderness.”

I said goodbye to my newfound neighbor with reluctance. She was invigorating to be around, with her crackling energy and quick laugh. The way she talked about her plucky solo jaunts when she was “young” made me feel like adventures were possible for me ahead, as well. Life wasn’t over yet. She waved to me from the door, “Come back any time!”

I spent a fair amount of time in the library just browsing the shelves, which held an eclectic collection of mostly donated books: dog mushing and home taxidermy, knot-tying and secrets to finding gold, small engine repair and remedies made from native plants. There was a whole section of leather-bound books dating back to the gold rush days. I checked out a well-worn copy of Coming into the Country.

One day I sat in a rocking chair close to the wood stove, paging through The Eugenic Marriage and Ole Mammy’s Torment, listening to the occasional conversation at the check-out desk. 

“Oz books again, Mandy?” The volunteer—the pastor’s wife—at the desk smiled at the young girl setting down a stack of books that came up to her chin. “How many times have you read Ozma of Oz? The girl spoke up proudly. “Three times. But I still want to read it again.” She reminded me of myself at her age, biking home with my handlebar basket so loaded with books that I could hardly steer. This little log cabin was far different from the Spanish-style library where I had sat reading as a girl, listening to the waves breaking on the beach outside the open window. 

A man with prematurely gray hair walked in and said, “Fish and Game meeting Wednesday.”

“I’ll be there,” said the one of the two brothers who ran Eagle’s small power and telephone company. “I want to hear the forecast for the king season. Hope it’s better than last year. Next thing you know they’ll be shutting down our fish wheels.”

There was a wooden model of a fish wheel by the window, and I would have liked to see a full-sized one—ten feet tall—turning, turning in the river, scooping up the huge fish. Sitting there, listening, reading, soaking up the warmth from the fire, my contentment was marred by a sense of guilt for being gone from home so much in the past year. It felt strange to be away from my children for so long; the boys and I had always been close when they were growing up. Thomas and I had homeschooled them for much of their childhood. I’d reveled in having such huge expanses of time with my kids while other mothers were squeezing in “priority” minutes here and there between school and daycare and homework. 

With Emlyn, an absent-minded freckle-faced kid with glasses, I had engaged in long, far-ranging conversations about the world and space and books. My communication with Ambrose, a sensitive, vulnerable-looking child, had always been on a nonverbal level, as we spent hours together exploring the fields around our house and days at a time at my friend’s, forty miles south of Pullman. I missed my sons’ boyish voices, just as my mom had hated the silence in our huge house after her seven children left home. Maybe, I thought, I was running away from the empty nest my house would soon become; then it would be just Thomas and me living under one roof, each aloof and alone.

I had gradually withdrawn from Thomas because in some ways, his diagnosis had made things worse. He now had an excuse for his often hurtful behavior and made no effort to keep his temper in check. Throughout our marriage, he had been prone to shout at me for the smallest of infractions—everything from not rolling up the car windows before a rain to forgetting to record checks in the checkbook. He called me a blithering idiot, a quitter, a royal fuck-up, a total bitch, and was constantly putting me down until I came to think of myself as he did—incompetent, stupid, and at fault for everything. He frequently made threatening statements that began with, “Don’t make me . . . “

Even before Thomas and I had gotten married (we were engaged for two years), my dad had expressed reservations about Thomas and had growled one day, “I don’t like how you yell at my daughter.”

After one of Thomas’s more recent outbursts in front of a piano student, the girl—a sweet ten-year-old Korean kid who had once put on my lipstick and made kissy lips on the bathroom mirror—came into the kitchen and said, “He doesn’t treat you very well.”

“I know,” I whispered, as if it were a secret between just the two of us.

“Why do you put up with it? If my husband yelled at me that much, I’d be out of there,” my friends said. “He’s worth it,” was always my answer. There were so many things I loved about Thomas. He cried when watching sentimental old movies like the Christmas classic Miracle on 34^th Street and choked up when one of his students had a breakthrough, even if it was just a beginning adult student successfully struggling through “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” for the first time or a precocious seven year old sailing note perfect through “Fur Elise.” He became the loving father of my children, and I saw him in both our sons—in Ambrose’s intensity and musical talent and in Emlyn’s quick intelligence and delight in words. We took long walks through an overgrown orchard at the edge of town, talking of ideas, music, our children, our future. 

I spent most of my waking hours in Eagle—which were dispersed randomly around the clock, with the twilight hours of one and two a.m. being my favorite time—drifting around town, ambling along the riverbank looking for rocks, and poking around a long-abandoned dump—a graveyard of Blazo fuel cans, dented tin buckets, enamel basins with the bottoms rusted out, and coffee cans with scenes of camels and men in flowing, multi-colored robes. Sometimes the full moon was so bright it hurt my eyes if I stared straight at it.

The nighttime hush made Skagway seem like a noisy metropolis in comparison, although even there, the sounds had been old-fashioned and soothing: train whistles, the low blast of the ferry’s horn, the drone of prop planes overhead. After living the first twenty-seven years of my life in cities, Pullman had seemed quiet to me, with no obnoxious noises, just a basketball bouncing in a neighbor’s driveway, a combine harvesting wheat on the hillside, the announcer’s voice at the high school football game carrying across the fields. But the silence in Eagle echoed like a slow-ringing bell lingering in my ear. I became like the Victrola dog, going around with my head cocked, listening, listening hard to that hypnotic absence of sound.

In addition to working on my book, I decided to write an article about Coming into the Country, a kind of “where are they now” piece about the people McPhee had described so vividly. The first person I approached to interview was the man who had been featured prominently as “the central figure in town” because he was not only the mayor, but also the postmaster and the customs agent. 

Marshall was eager to talk. As soon as I sat down in his living room, he opened up.

“I was very upset when that book came out. McPhee tread all over people’s private lives—he didn’t care. He wrote about people’s problems and situations—gossipy stuff. He made Eagle sound like a pretty rip-roaring place. If it hadn’t been written up that way, it wouldn’t have met his object in writing the book, which is to show that Eagle attracts idiosyncratic people who came into the country for their own reasons, which they are fulfilling to the best of their capacity. It attracts people looking for adventure, people who want to prove themselves. Some are hiding out or running away from something.” He finished emphatically, “I’m not running away from anything.”

Marshall looked like a man who knew who he was and where he belonged. In the years since McPhee’s book was published, he had become the town’s respected elder statesman who presided over community gatherings, always being asked to say a few words. McPhee had described Marshall as having “a lightness about him, of manner, appearance, and style.” He was still that way. Although Marshall dressed in the same outdoor garb as the rest of the men in town, he always managed to look rather dapper.

“Whatever happened to the other people in the book?”

“You’d be surprised,” Marshall said rather mysteriously. He got up and returned shortly with a notebook. Inside was a list of all the people who were in Coming into the Country. He’d kept it up to date over the years, making notes on their whereabouts.

“A lot of them are dead.”

I didn’t find that surprising, given that we were talking about almost three decades ago. 

“The older ones, I suppose.”

“No, old-timers and young ones. Kind of strange.”

Out of the forty-seven Eagle residents named in the book, four were murdered, one shot herself by accident, one shot himself on purpose, two drowned, two were killed in a plane crash and one in a car wreck. Another sixteen people left town.

“There’s only a few of us left.”

We sat in silence for minute, drinking out tea, considering the list. Even though McPhee had written that “The country is full of stories of unusual deaths,” I was still a little spooked.

Marshall laughed suddenly. “After Coming into the Country came out, people from Outside used to line up at the customs desk with their passports open and their book to be signed and stamped. Some people even moved here after reading that book. Ask Lydia, the postmistress.”

So I did. The next day, I mailed a letter to my kids and asked Lydia if it was true she came here because of McPhee’s book.

“Yup. We lived in Georgia and after we read Coming into the Country, I sent my husband up to Eagle to check it out. It was fifteen years after the book came out but he came back and said, ‘It’s just like he wrote.’” They promptly packed up their four kids and moved to Eagle.

Lydia was right. Now, many years after her family moved here, and almost three decades after McPhee said that Eagle was “where civilization stops,” things had changed very little, at least to my eyes. The population still hovered around a hundred and thirty, give or take a dozen summer people. There were the same log cabins, gravel streets, outhouses, and the all-important well house. Life was still dictated not by the clock, but by the seasons; people still drew sustenance from the soil, the river, and the woods; and the town had not lost its sense of timelessness and being far from Outside. In a world of change, such continuity was deeply reassuring. I was tired of experiencing a let-down after reading an old National Geographic about some fascinating part of the world, and knowing it was, by now, no longer the same—another irreplaceable culture gone, another unique place lost. In Eagle, much good still remained.

I later learned the lack of so-called “progress” was attributable not only to Eagle’s isolation but to a deliberate effort to retain the unique character of the town. One year the city council accepted the Department of Transportation’s offer to pave the roads in Eagle to keep down the dust. However, the council hadn’t bothered to ask the residents if they wanted paved roads. Someone got wind of the plan and drew up a petition against it. Almost everyone in town signed, including some teenagers and kids, maybe even a dog or two. The plan was scrapped. As one local said, “Why would we want to become like everywhere else?” The people of Eagle liked things just fine the way they were. Leave all those fast-paced changes to the Lower 48.

I learned to take my own time, too, as I walk in the woods. Stopping at a young aspen tree, I put my hand around the narrow trunk like taking a child’s wrist to cross the street. I stroked the tender bark with the color and nap of a ripe peach. I had the sense of waiting for something to unfold, like the trees around me with their buds swelling in the lengthening days. At their feet lay last year’s leaves, fascinating in their variety. Those that had decayed beneath the snow were slick and blue-black as a sheet of mimeograph paper peeled from the drum. Others were bleached and rolled into tubes, hollow and weightless as bird bones. The ground underfoot was uncertain, giving way in places like I was stepping on a roll of chicken wire. Birch trees, rotted from the inside, left nothing but a white collar of bark where there had once been a trunk.

As the weeks passed, tiny leaves unfurled. The woods smelled sweet even before the first purple crocuses appeared, and green showed in the crevasses of Eagle Bluff. I came across animals that seemed to have little fear of humans, although the small red squirrels should have been afraid of people because they had always been a target. The Han Athabaskans used to make their soft fur into baby clothes, and now locals shot them and threw them to their dogs as treats. Squirrels were considered more than a nuisance—even a danger—because they liked to eat the insulation beneath cabin roofs. I saw one dog tuck a tiny squirrel into its cheek like a wad of tobacco and meander off with it.

The spruce grouse, which reminded me of frumpy housefrau, were good company as they went about their business looking for insects on the forest floor, undisturbed by my presence. The snowshoe hares didn’t freeze on sight like cottontails, but continued on their way. One traveled down the road with me, staying just a few yards ahead, lifting each long white foot deliberately like a child wearing her father’s slippers. In the long slow twilight that never ended, a weasel-like marten emerged from the brush and, catching sight of me, turned and humped its way back into the woods, unhurriedly, exhibiting not fear but rather annoyance I had interrupted his midnight quest for food.

From my cabin window, I watched two gray jays—or “camp robbers” as the locals call them—tussling in the air. They plummeted to the ground onto a pile of leaves. The strong one took the other bird’s wing firmly in his beak and threw it left and right like a wrestler, the weaker bird protesting audibly. Later, after the smaller bird had been vanquished, the aggressor turned on me, dive-bombing me and doing a touch-and-go on my cap. 

I observed the townspeople closely and noticed that few had a full set of teeth. Their teeth were chipped, broken, or missing. Some were gold-rimmed as an old schoolmaster’s spectacles, others like trees leaning in the unstable permafrost. But there was no self-consciousness, no smiles hidden behind a hand, just a scattered handful of discolored teeth in the midst of a wild white beard or showing in the lined face of a woman who’d gardened under the midnight sun for decades. 

Fewer women than men were visible in this male-dominated environment, and I was the only woman who frequented the small establishment that could generously be called a coffee shop. The Whistle Stop held little more than a few tables, a freezer and microwave, and a bottomless pot of coffee. People helped themselves to frozen cheeseburgers and corndogs and warmed them up in the microwave. Wall decorations included the requisite moose and caribou antlers, a map of Alaska, a four-foot-long two-man saw, an otter pelt, and a large leg trap—big enough to catch a wolf, I was told. In the window hung a few dream catchers for sale, beaded by local women. The owner often sat behind the counter doing leatherwork, tooling a moose or eagle into a belt or knife sheath. He usually had country music playing, but whenever I came in he put on a Gordon Lightfoot tape. I didn’t know whether to be touched or insulted. 

For the most part, the men ignored me and talked amongst themselves. Like everyone else, I wrote my name on a Styrofoam cup, put it on the shelf and used it again the next day. I lingered over my coffee, just listening. Smokey had written about newcomers to Alaska, “The only cheechako who is popular without reservation is the one who keeps his ears and eyes open and asks questions cautiously and only when he must.” As a cheechako, or newcomer, I didn’t expect to be popular, I was just grateful to be allowed to stay without being run out of there. When anyone did speak to me, I had to refrain from my usual tendency to ask too many questions; it was our natural curiosity that had led to both my grandmother’s and my own involvement in journalism—hers as a newspaper reporter and mine as a freelance writer.

I was interested to view the men at close quarters, noting a few of them were so dirty they looked like a cross between a homeless person and a chimney sweep, with soot ground into their pores, and their beard, hair, and clothes stiff with grime. I listened to stories about people with names like Memphis, Greek, the Lieutenant, Noodles, The Troll, Jackerbob. Someone mentioned a guy who’d just come off a bender, his eyes looking “like two piss holes in the snow.” The chief of the Native village saw a Dall sheep, a big one, on the bluffs across the river. A neighbor had a new hound pup. Someone’s chainsaw had gone “tits up.”

Like the two gray jays I’d seen grappling in the dirt, the men occasionally engaged in their own less-obvious tussles, trying to one-up each other with bear stories. I got the feeling these tales had been exchanged many times over the years until the details were as well known by the listeners as by the teller. The black bear that chased the cat through the cabin door but got his head tangled in the mosquito netting just long enough for the woman to grab a gun and shoot it. The eight-foot tall grizzly that came through the dog yard, swatting fifty-pound sled dogs into the air with its enormous paws.

These stories were told with a certain swaggering tone, an air of bravado that was understandable but somewhat irritating all the same. All except one. The small, unassuming and spectacularly dirty man named Billy, whom I’d met at the post office, was prompted to tell about the time he shot a grizzly through the plastic window of his cabin. He told the story sketchily, with a humorous, self-deprecating air, as if he scarcely believed it himself. After the other men left, I ventured to ask him for more details. He refused to sit at the table with me, but hunkered down on his haunches against the wall while he told me about having to kill the bear because it kept coming around to get the salmon drying on his fish rack.

There was something appealing about this curious figure, and I looked for him whenever I went into The Whistle Stop. Gradually he ventured a little closer to me, until one day he sat at the next table over. He sipped his coffee and remained quiet until I couldn’t refrain and prompted him with a question. He paused before he replied, gathering his thoughts. He spoke slowly and quietly. He had a strange calm about him, a stillness he exuded, which fell about him like the warm glow of a kerosene lamp. I wanted to stay in that circle of tranquility, so I kept him talking.

 “If you don’t mind telling me, where do you live?”

“Four point eight miles out of town, figuring from the post office. Upriver, past the Native village.”

 I nodded, as if I knew where that was. Almost everyone I’d ever met in my travels around the state had an interesting story about how and why they came to Alaska. I kept my ears open for these oft-told narratives; perhaps if I heard many other people’s reasons, I’d discover my own. I asked Billy how he wound up this far north.

“I got a job on a hotshot crew. I’d never been to Alaska before, but I lit out of Arizona as soon as I could.”

I must have looked puzzled because he explained, with a hint of pride, that “hotshots” were specialized, highly trained firefighters sent into particularly challenging situations, usually in remote areas, where they were dropped off by helicopter. It was obvious he missed the job, which he had quit ten years earlier for reasons he didn’t state. I wondered, too, what had made him flee Arizona.

As I watched Billy talk, I looked him over. He was a short, slight man dressed from head to toe in camo, which many people in town wore—even the women. “Good for hiding the dirt,” one woman told me. He had brown, tangled hair that fell to his shoulders and blue eyes barely visible through the dirty lenses of his glasses. Of course he had the requisite Alaska beard, long and untrimmed. It was hard to tell how old he was, maybe in his late thirties, a few years younger than me. That was the last I saw of this intriguing character for a while. I didn’t lay eyes on him again until a few days before I was to leave Eagle.